Edzell Castle Garden (2)

Along the south side of Sir David, Lord Lindsay's early 17th century walled garden are the arched-headed panels that comprise on of the highlights of the Edzell Castle Garden. The six remaining sculptures on this wall, which depict the Liberal Arts, were created by an anonymous but highly accomplished craftsmen.

The beautiful figures representing Grammar (Grammatica), Rhetoric (Rhetorica) and Argument (Dialectica) depict those studies undertaken for the first part of the medieval university curriculum, the Trivium. Grammar the art of using words correctly, was followed by Rhetoric, the art of connected discourse, followed by the art of argument.

Rhetorica

Dialectica

The panels depicting Arithmetic (Arithmetica), Music (Musica), Geometry (Geometria) and the missing panel Astronomy represent the curriculum for the higher studies that formed the Quadrivium.

Arithmetica

Geometria

Musica

In the south-east corner of the walled garden had been a bath house, now vanished, that comprised three rooms, a bathing room with a well, a dressing room and a sitting room with a fireplace.

Edzell Banqueting House

In the south east corner of the garden at Edzell, and projecting behind it is a small garden or banqueting house. This delightful wee gazebo imitates  in miniature a Scottish domestic house of the early seventeenth century, with  its twisted chimneys, its crow stepped gables and decorations above the windows , and its turnpike stair housed in a circular tower with a turret on top.

The decorative scheme of the garden is carried across the internal facade of the house. Over the window on the first floor on the garden side are Sir David's  monogram, SDL.

There are two rooms on the ground floor, the one on the garden side ribbed and vaulted with a stone bench running around the wall.

The upper room has a closet leading off in the turret, and a fireplace at the other end. Beneath the windows are small holes said to be gunloops. On display in this room is a, precious, carved wooden panel that came from the castle.

At the south west corner of the garden there had been at one time a bathhouse. An unprecedented luxury for early seventeenth century Scotland.

Edzell Castle Garden

Sir David Lindsay, Lord Lindsay built his garden adjoining his father's castle in 1604. There are two entrances, one directly from the courtyard of the castle and another in the east wall. This door has identical heraldic panels on either side of the door, which bears the arms and initials of Sir David and his second wife Isobel Forbes, with the family motto 'DUM SPIRO SPERO' - 'While I live I hope, and the date, 1604.

The outside of the east wall is decorated with shamrocks, thistles, roses and the fleur de lys, for Ireland, Scotland, England and France, the countries ruled by, or claimed by King James VI after the Union of the Crowns in 1603.

Inside is an enchanted garden, early seventeenth century style. The east wall is divided into sixteen compartments by pilasters, of which only the capitals and bases remain.  The wall is finished at the top with molded capital stones set between domed niches that probably once held busts, or urns, but are now empty.

The compartments are divided between two alternating patterns. In one the central space depicts the Lindsay arms, the fess chequy, composed of three rows of stone recesses like the squares of a chequer board. The red sandstone is the red of the coat-of-arms, the solid squares were painted blue (azure) and the flowers in the recess were white (argent), and in reverse. Above are carved the seven-rayed stars the Lindsay's inherited from the earlier owner's of Edzell, the Stirling's of Glenesk. At the centre of each star is a hole, for birds to nest in. How thoughtful is that?

In the alternating panels is a scheme composed on a square for holding plants beneath a carved sculpture in relief.

 On the east wall the sculptures depict the Planetary Deities: Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury and the Moon. The Planetary Deities as they were imagined in the early sixteenth century and beneath each figure is the associated astronomical sign.

Luna

Mercury

Venus

Sol

Jupiter

Saturn

(The relief sculptures in the east wall are replicas, the originals are displayed in the banqueting house. All the other panels in the garden are the originals.)

Edzell Castle

Built over the sixteenth red sandstone Edzell Castle was a seat of the Lindsay family who had acquired through marriage to the Stirling's of  Glenesk. It occupied a strategic position in relation to the passes through the mountains from Angus to Mar. It was visited by Mary, Queen of Scots and her son James VI on two occasions. It was while he was staying at Edzell that he heard of the assassination of the French King, Henri III, the last surviving brother, of his mother's first husband. When these monarchs visited, Edzell was the residence of Sir David Lindsay, the creator of the garden.

Sir David Lindsay was a highly educated and cultured man. Educated abroad at the universities of Paris and Cambridge he was made a Lord of Session in 1593 and a member of the Privy Council in 1598. But it is his garden that we must thank him for most. One of the most romantic places in Scotland.

Sadly the cultured Lindsay's of Edzell seem to have been perpetually short of money. When it finally ran out in 1715, the castle and estate was sold to a cousin, the Earl of Panmure. And unfortunately for the earl, later the same year, he backed the loosing side in the Jacobite Rebellion, and lost everything he owned.

Edzell passed into the hands of the York Buildings Company and after the company went bust all the assets were stripped out to pay the creditors, roofs removed, floors taken out and even the magnificent avenue of beech trees were cut down and sold for their timber.

The estate was bought back by William Maule, Earl of Panmure and on his death passed to his nephew, 8th Earl of Dalhousie, ancestor of the present owner. Such was the importance of the garden that in the 1930's it was taken into the care of the state.